Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [52]
Claud made love as if he had all the time in the world. He might not feel like it for a week, he might disappear, he might feel too low and mean. But when he came to it, he took his sweet time. He loved up every bit of her. He would stroke the silky skin on the underside of her arms until her breasts would begin to burn, he would play with her breasts with light teasing and then he would take great handfuls and nuzzle and suck, until her belly ached with wanting. He would rub his thing against her languidly, slowly, slowly he would slip in and then ease out, slip in and ease out until she was thrusting him in herself with her hand. After he came, he would pause a little but he would stay hard. Then he would go on and go on. He would be so patient and so deliberate with her, so slow and easy, that she could give herself up to loving him back, to enjoying his coming, to the feeling of their skins touching, knowing that she would have her pleasure opening out full and slow in her.
She had gone into a bar on Second Avenue—one of the few bars with a mixed black and Puerto Rican clientele—looking for Eddie, who’d stopped paying child support. She was sitting at a table alone, low in mind, feeling she must look as if she wanted to be picked up. She had noticed Claud at the back having a drink with some friends, just as she warily noticed every man who came and went. She held a newspaper propped in front of her and nursed a warm beer, hoping that Eddie or one of his compadres would walk through the door.
After some banter with the bartender, Claud started to play his saxophone: blues, spirituals, some popular songs. She was glad. He played all right, but she was glad because she had something to be doing sitting there: she could watch the big black man with the opaque glasses playing saxophone and she could be beating time to music, and only from the corner of her eye keep a watch on the door. Not till Claud finished and passed the hat did she realize he was blind. That took her off guard, so that when he came back to her table, returned the quarter she had dropped in the hat and asked if he could sit down and buy her a beer, she had agreed—not to be rude, because his blindness took her off guard.
This rotten place, it gave her nothing to do and too much time to do it in. Here she was brooding on Claud again. She couldn’t take it. Remembering him just cut her to bleeding hunks. Dead.
Ten-thirty. She had been up for four hours and the big event had been waiting in line for breakfast for half an hour. On the ward it was a bad day. Mrs. Richard found the sixteen-year-old black girl, Sylvia, leaning against the radiator with the side of her face burned. She was dragged off to seclusion, numb with drugs, and whatever they did to her would not include treating the burn.
Then old Mrs. Stein came out of the toilet with shit rubbed in her hair, and while one of the attendants was dragging her back in, Sharma suddenly began to punch Glenda. “You goddamn whore! I know you’re carrying on with my husband. You both think I’m stupid! Whore of Babylon! You’re doing it with all the doctors. Everybody’s talking about you, whore! You do it with all of them!”
By eleven-thirty half the seclusion rooms on the ward were full and the patients lined up for an extra-heavy dose of tranks, given in liquid form that burned the throat raw and made her hoarse. She could feel minds stirring like poplars in a storm all through the ward, and occasionally a brittle branch would break off and crash to the floor. They were angry about being kept in, with none of the minute breaks in routine to look forward to that made a life on G-2. She sat on the floor in a place where she could catch a glimpse of a whole window full of nothing but leaves if she held her head just right. If she sat at the right angle, she couldn’t see the other buildings and the green could fill her eyes.
The medication was dragging her down, filling